Includes bibliographical references (p. [193]-209) and index.
Contents:
Thomas Gray, virtual authorship, and the performed voice -- Wales, public poetry, and the politics of collective voice -- Scotland and the invention of voice -- Impersonating native voices in Anglo-Indian poetry -- Coda: reading the archive of the inauthentic.
Summary:
In this book James Mulholland offers a new assessment of the origins, evolution, and importance of poetic voice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By examining a series of literary experiments in which authors imitated oral voices and impersonated foreign speakers, Mulholland uncovers an innovative global aesthetics of poetic voice that arose as authors invented new ways of crafting textual voices and appealing to readers. As poets drew on cultural forms from around Great Britain and across the globe, impersonating "primitive" speakers and reviving ancient oral performances (or fictionalizing them in verse), they invigorated English poetry. Mulholland situates these experiments with oral voices and foreign speakers within the wider context of British nationalism at home and colonial expansion overseas.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.